Raspberry Pi Zero turns a Motorola Lapdock into an actual laptop

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Some of you might have a Motorola Lapdock laying around from your days as an Atrix or Droid Bionic user. It might be time to dust it off, because it turns out it’s quite easy to turn it into a full-on laptop.

It won’t cost you much money to do the conversion, either, if you follow the plans laid out by blogger Ax0n over at H-I-R.net. All it takes is a Raspberry Pi Zero and a couple of cables. Heck, even if you have to go out and buy a Lapdock this still isn’t an expensive build.

The Raspberry Pi Zero sells for just $5. You can pick up the two cables you need — micro USB to USB OTG and female micro HDMI to HDMI — from Amazon for around $8. You should be able to find a working Lapdock on eBay for $60 or $70. That brings the total bill to roughly $80.

The Pi Zero’s 1GHz Broadcomm processor isn’t going to turn a Lapdock into a Microsoft Surface competitor, but it’s powerful enough to rock your favorite emulator, do a little web browsing or word processing, and watch some 1080p videos.

This isn’t the first time someone has hooked a Raspberry Pi up to a Lapdock, but it’s one of the more elegant setups because Ax0n managed to fit nearly everything inside the case. After tucking things behind the Lapdock’s keyboard, Ax0n made a couple of other quick modifications to the chassis.

He drilled out two holes — one to allow easy access to the Pi’s micro SD card slot and another just over the Lapdock’s reset button. If he has to coax it into starting up properly, it’s a whole lot easier to poke a pinkie in than to pull out the spudger and pry the case apart just to access the button.